Product Reviews

Last month we reviewed Sapphire's HD 3870, which is a fine mid-range graphics card. If you have a CrossFire motherboard, you could buy two of these cards for much better performance.

However, CrossFire is tricky to set up and not all games support it. An alternative is the new 3870 X2, which has two HD 3870 graphics processors. Each has 512MB of GDDR3 RAM and runs at 825MHz, 50MHz faster than the HD 3870. Oddly, the memory runs at 1.8GHz, which is slower than the original card's 2.25GHz.

Using beta drivers, we

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saw impressive performance. Both Prey and Dark Messiah ran at over 100fps. 3DMark06 was no match for the X2 either, as it scored 12,635, the highest result we've seen. With the DirectX 10 title Crysis, average frame rates were more meagre at 25fps with high quality settings and no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering. Frame rates plummeted when there was a lot of action, so we had to reduce to medium quality for smooth gameplay. We hope to see better performance with finished drivers.

The real problem with this card is space. The two-slot design is 270mm long and weighs 1kg. It needs two six-pin PCI-E power connectors, one of which must be an eight-pin connector if you want to enable overclocking settings in the Catalyst Control Center. The fan wasn't noisy, but the card became hot to touch.

At almost £260, the HD 3870 X2 isn't much cheaper than buying two HD 3870s. However, it's still considerably cheaper than a GeForce 8800 Ultra, which is roughly as fast.

We can't recommend the 3870 X2 unconditionally, as Nvidia is about to launch new cards. We'd wait for the benchmark results.